Philosophical Percolationstag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-1247022466765678212017-08-22T14:34:41-07:00All the philosophy that's not fit to print.TypePadThe Basic Law of Falliblitytag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d83451aec269e201b8d2a2b697970c2017-08-22T14:34:41-07:002017-08-22T14:47:00-07:00Thus if we take the formula above is the only axiom, we can get as simple theorems most of the basic properties of falible systems. For example: take processes of belief formation to be the means we get to reach the truth. Under this assumption,we can interpret the variables, M, E to mean epistemic justification and truth respectively (and consequently, C would be the absence of epistemic luck). Thus, from the above fundamental axiom of falible epistemic justification), we easily get fallibility as theorem: Axel Arturo Barceló Aspeitia
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p><span style="font-size: 13pt;"><strong>by Axel Arturo Barceló Aspeitia</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13pt;">Let M and E be <em>means</em> and <em>ends, </em>and let C be the property of there being a <em>connection </em>between ends and means such that whether the means were appropriate or not (at least partially) explains why the end was achieved or not. In other words, C means that no <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luck" rel="wikipedia noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title="Luck">luck</a> was involved, i.e., whether the end was achieved or not was not a matter of luck.&nbsp;</span></p>
<h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">The Metaphysical Space</span></h2>
<p><span style="font-size: 13pt;"><em> <a class="asset-img-link" href="http://drjon.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451aec269e201b8d2a2b57f970c-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Screen Shot 2017-08-22 at 4.23.17 PM" border="0" class="asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d83451aec269e201b8d2a2b57f970c image-full img-responsive" src="http://drjon.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451aec269e201b8d2a2b57f970c-800wi" title="Screen Shot 2017-08-22 at 4.23.17 PM" /></a><br />&nbsp;</em></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13pt;"><em>This </em>is easily represented by a simple formula (well, actyally, by many equivalent formulas) in <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propositional_calculus" rel="wikipedia noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title="Propositional calculus">propositional logic</a>:</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">B [<a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Basic_Law" rel="wikipedia noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title="Hong Kong Basic Law">Basic Law</a>] = C ⊃ (M ≡ E)</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13pt;">Since this formula is equivalent to the diagram, this synthesizes the metaphysical relations between means, ends and luck necessary to model falibility, <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem" rel="wikipedia noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title="Gettier problem">Gettier cases</a>, etc. and, as therefore, it should be considered the basic law of fallible systems. However, it is very difficult to paraphrase in simple English. What it says is that the issue of whether a proper connection exists between ends and means such that whether the means were appropriate or not (at least partially) explains why the end was achieved or not only occurs either when the end is achieved and the means are appropriate or when the end is not achieved and the ends were not the appropriate ones. This is not only a mouthful, but a very complex sentence (and I doubt I have made a good work of conveying <em>B</em> in English at all!). However, looking at the formula (and the table) above, we see that the relation is actually quite simple (once properly represented).</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13pt;">Thus if we take the formula above is the only axiom, we can get as simple theorems most of the basic properties of falible systems. For example: take processes of belief formation to be the means we get to reach the truth. Under this assumption,we can interpret the variables, <em>M</em>, <em>E</em> to mean <em><a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_justification" rel="wikipedia noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title="Theory of justification">epistemic justification</a></em> and <em>truth</em> respectively (and consequently, <em>C</em> would be the absence of epistemic luck). Thus, from the above <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Completeness_of_the_real_numbers" rel="wikipedia noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title="Completeness of the real numbers">fundamental axiom</a> of falible epistemic justification), we easily get fallibility as theorem: </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">B, M ⊬ E</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13pt;">i.e., that justification is fallible. Furthermore, if we adopt an anti-luck definition of knowledge, i.e., that knowledge is <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief" rel="wikipedia noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" title="Belief">justified true belief</a> plus the absence of luck, </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">K = C ∧ M ∧ E</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13pt;">we also get the Gettier theorem, i.e., that knowledge is not justified true belief : </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">B, M, E ⊬ K</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13pt;">and that Gettier implies luck, i.e., that in all Gettier cases, some luck is involved: </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">B ⊢(B ∧ M, ∧ E ∧ ¬ K) ⊃ (¬C). </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13pt;">Furthermore, we also get Zagzebski's&nbsp;theorem, i.e., that no other falible condition can be added to justification and truth that would yield knowledge. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">If B, F ⊬ E, then&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 13pt;">B, M, F, E ⊬ K</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13pt;">i.e., justified true belief plus any falible property is not enough for knowledge either.</span></p></div>
Robert Brandom (and Richard Rorty's) schocking ableismtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d83451aec269e201bb09769788970d2017-02-08T07:59:55-08:002017-02-08T08:11:31-08:00By Jon Cogburn I hate to point out that I find some aspects of Robert Brandom's philosophy to be morally rebarbative for two reasons. First, I don't think it follows from this that he's a bad person. I've never met him, but have had the pleasure to meet many of...Jon Cogburn

By Jon Cogburn

I hate to point out that I find some aspects of Robert Brandom's philosophy to be morally rebarbative for two reasons. First, I don't think it follows from this that he's a bad person. I've never met him, but have had the pleasure to meet many of his students and I have every reason to think that he is a good soul. Second, I think that Brandom is one of the three most important living philosophers, and that the dialectic does in fact go through him. Unfortunately though, our age of media gotchaism has infected philosophy. Just as it's appropriate to judge a celebrity by their worst public moment, it's somehow appropriate to judge philosophers by the worst aspects of their systems. Heidegger's Nazism has absolutely nothing to do with the interpretations of Heidegger by the overwhelming number of American Heideggerians. But tying the Nazism to some part of his system (with more and less plausibility)* suffices in our debased celebrity culture. It's very convenient because it gives us an excuse not to read Heidegger.** Moreover, even if, unlike Heidegger, Brandom's rebarbative views about those who don't speak really is implicated deeply in his philosophical achievements, this wouldn't be a reason not to read him, any more than Cartesian vivisectionists mean we should stop reading Descartes.

Now here is a biographical prelimary. One of my daughter's best friends has apraxia of speech. Every weekend Audrey's friend with apraxia and her sister either come over to our house, or she goes over to their house. It's only recently that Audrey's friend with apraxia has started talking with her sister and Audrey when they are playing together. For a couple of years she didn't speak, and some people with apraxia of speech never talk. In addition, I know two people who suffered severe aphasia after a stroke. Both recovered their ability to speak. But for many people, aphasia is a permanent state. Finally, people born deaf in communities with no sign language often end up being permanently non-linguistic. There is a largish literature on people in this situation who are taught a first language at later ages, examining how their difficulties tie with the lessened ability to learn a second language as you get older. But many such people never learn a language.

I hope that anyone reading this will agree that any view that denies moral worth to those with severe apraxia, aphasia, and deafness is in fact a wicked view. And, to the extent that one can separate moral and epistemological concerns, anyone who actually knows or has studied people with apraxia, aphasia, and deafness who do not have language will not deny sentience to these people. Yet Robert Brandom does both.

There is a long history of Brandom talking about all mute animals as mere automatons (nearly any time he mentions parrots) which will strike many as morally problematic for just these reasons. But perhaps that was just philosophy of mind and there would be some way he could, qua philosopher of mind, accommodate research on these disabilities. Perhaps his philosophy of mind didn't have the expected ethical consequences? No. His discussion of pain in his recent Perspectives on Pragmatism makes it clear that those of us morally bothered by that aspect of his philosophy of mind were right to have been.

What matters for us morally, and so ultimately politically, is not in the end to be understood in terms of goals available from the inevitably reductive perspective of the naturalist: paradigmatically, the avoidance of mammalian pain. It is the capacity each of us discursive creatures has to say things that no one else has ever said, things furthermore that would never have been said if we did not say them. It is our capacity to transform the vocabularies in which we live and move and have our being, and so to create new ways of being (for creatures like us). Our moral worth is our dignity as potential contributors to the Conversation. This is what our political institutions have a duty to recognize, secure, and promote. Seen from this point of view, it is a contingent fact about us that physiological agony is such a distraction from sprightly repartee and the production of fruitful novel utterances. But it is a fact nonetheless. And for that reason, pain, and like it various sorts of social and economic deprivation, have a secondhand, but nonetheless genuine moral significance [152].

Note that this is similar to the line that some social contract theorists and Kantians take about the moral status of animals. In themselves, animals have no moral status, but if we are cruel to animals we are more likely to be cruel to humans. But there is nothing wrong in itself with cruelty to animals, which would be fine if it didn't have the tendency of making adult humans cruel to one another. This is not an abstract problem, since the idea that cruelty to animals actually makes us cruel to one another is false, so long as the cruelty is mechanized and hid from most humans as it is in factory farms. For Brandom, pain as well as deprivation of animals or humans only has a secondary moral significance. It is not bad in itself, but bad only to the extent that it contingently contributes to actual moral harms, in this case preventing the creative exercise of language.

I'm not interested in the possible ableism of Brandom being committed to the idea that to be mute as a result of apraxia, aphasia, or deafness (plus lack of exposure to sign language) is to suffer a natural evil, indeed, the only natural evil admitted by Brandom's metaphysics. Such a view is clearly problematic, but I want to let it pass to focus on the aspect of his view that I find much more disturbing: his commitment to the idea that causing pain and deprivation, and death for that matter, to mute people is not intrinsically evil. This is morally outrageous as well as dangerous, dangerous given not only the systematic murder of the disabled as the run-up to the Holocaust, but also the way we continue to treat disabled people decades after the Holocaust.

Of course Brandom probably does think that the mute have a secondary moral significance, but (analogous to the Kantian and social contract theorist opponent of animal and children's rights) it can only be to the extent that mistreating them will cause those of us who can speak to be less likely to say novel things. I think that such a view would be outrageous even if its wide-spread acceptance wouldn't lead to more cruelty to the mute. But in fact, as with factory farming, it would lead to much more cruelty. When Stalin said that killing one person is a tragedy and killing a million a statistic, part of what he meant is that people adapt to systematic, widespread, and predictable cruelty. Again, think of factory farming mistreatment of animals. In no way does this make us more cruel to other humans. On the other hand, someone who learns to be cruel to the family pet probably will move on to humans. And it is, I think, a constraint on moral theorizing that one not be forced to say that opening salvo of the Holocaust, the organized murder of the disabled, was wrong merely because it led to other people saying less novel things. Not only is it not clear that this is true, but the connection to novelty is at best a non-sequitur.

I want to stop here, because any other criticism seems to me to weaken the severity of the charge. But there are a few other things worth pointing out in this context.

First, one of the most difficult things about reading Rorty is that his catchall term "vocabulary" is confusing precisely because it elides the distinction between saying something new in the sense of imparting new information and just using new words to say the same things. This was actually intentional on Rorty's part because he takes Quine to have deconstructed the distinction between information relevant to word meaning and collateral information involving that word.

But this is a misreading of Quine; what Quine did was undermine the way this distinction was being used to provide an account of necessity, where all necessary truths are true in virtue of meaning. Brandom, at his best, also shows how such uses of the distinction trace back to Kant and moreover undermine our ability to make sense of how we talk about new things. But Brandom also notes that in linguistic contexts, we have to mark the distinction. And many of Rorty's and Brandom's contexts are such. Consider the phrase "say things no one else has ever said" in the above quote. If by "things" you mean merely uttering new strings of words, yes, the awesome combinatorics of language makes it the case that people are saying new things all the time. But it's not at all clear why this on its own is important. In fact it's not, everyone might just be saying the same old things in new ways. How is that possibly morally relevant?

But even if by "things" you mean new strings of words with new meanings, it's still not clear why that's relevant. For an infinite number of "n" one can assert that there are n objects. There are always new things to say about the existence of larger numbers. But who cares? Instead, what Brandom must mean to reference is the ability to talk about new (in the non-trivial sense) and worthwhile things. He admits as much in the third to last sentence of the above quote, when he qualifies things with "new and fruitful." But then this seems to be begging the question. What's morally relevant is the ability not to utter sequences of words that have never been uttered before, but to use this ability to say new and fruitful things. But what makes an utterance fruitful? Brandom should say that an utterance is fruitful if it gets us closer to truth, goodness, and beauty, but he can't then circularly define "goodness" in terms of producing novel fruitful utterances. So we must conclude that Brandom's circle is not only morally vicious, but conceptually so as well.

Second, and related, Brandom's discussion of moral status is a false dichotomy. He pits vulgar hedonistic utilitarianism against he and Rorty's view that "conversation" is the only intrinsic good. If one had to pick, one should pick utilitarianism. But it's beyond silliness to think that one has to pick one of these. One can be a moral externalist/realist and a pluralist about the kinds of goods on offer in the universe. Again, truth, beauty, and goodness are a decent place to start.

Third, we need to be very careful to separate Brandom's quasi-existentialist (and hence quasi-Kantian) view from another form of Kantianism, one defended ably by Julian Friedland in his debate with me on my abortion post. Friedland was trying to defend the idea that pain might not be morally significant in the sense that the ability to empathize might not be a necessary part of being a virtuous moral agent. The (Parfit's?) fictitious planet of virtuous sociopaths is brought in to motivate this view. But it is consistent with this strong form of Kantianism (I'm not sure Kant subscribed to it) that suffering pain makes one a moral patient, that pain, pleasure, and deprivation do not merely have a secondary moral status (and I know that Korsgaard has written on this, but I haven't read it yet). In this context, the just sociopaths could reason their way into realizing that those of us who can't speak are still moral patients and moral agents. Though of course much would need to be said on this score. But Brandom's hyper-Kantianism can't accommodate this.

Finally, the manner in which Brandom argues himself (and Rorty) into such a wicked view that the only intrinsic normativity concerns the goodness saying novel things is beyond the scope of this post. But let me note that taking truth, beauty, and goodness (in a sense to include pleasure and preclude deprivation and agony) to be intrinsically valuable was never actually never a living option for Brandom, for three interconnected reasons: (1) because of he and Rorty's radical reading of Sellars' myth of the given which prevents pain from being both causal and normative, (2) their ultimate positivistic commitment to moral internalism, and (3) Brandom's dismissal of functionalist explanations that bootstrap beliefs and desires out of actions and pre-existing goal directing norms (not just survival and reproduction but beauty, truth, and goodness) as primary. Both (2) and (3) follow from the misreading of the myth of the given, though (3) gains plausibility from Brandom's false dichotomy between classical pragmatist views that define belief in terms of desire and acts and his own inversion of this. Again, this neglects views such as Mark Okrent's which have beliefs and desires simultaneously bootstrapping up out a realm of goals and acts. Contra Brandom's take on the myth of the given, I would say that we subscribe to it not when we think something is both causal and normative, but rather when we treat things that are normative and causal as if they were merely causal. In this respect, Brandom (but not McDowell) on pain is no different from empiricists on sense data.***

[Notes:

*A certain kind of existentialist voluntarism, emphasis on the wonder working powers of the German language, the way he articulates the history of being, and his critique of technology can all be tied to some of the German Romantic strains that led to Nazism. But even this is beside the point. Existentialism is false. Sympathetic readers of Heidegger's own essays on art and animals, and proper interpreters of the anti-Cartesian accomplishment of Being and Time's first division, see the language stuff as in fact hostile to his own project. The history of being stuff is a noble attempt at anti-foundationalism, but it leads either to a facile relativism, or the chauvinism of the language stuff. The critique of technology is correct. But these things stand or fall completely separate from considerations of their role in Nazism. And they are all distinct from Heidegger's anti-Cartesian accomplishment.

**Incidentally, most of the verbiage surrounding the analytic/continental split is in the service of having an excuse not to read relevant philosophy. It's no accident that the latest bout of Heidegger controversy has cropped up precisely when the old continental core of German Idealism, Phenomenology, and (Post-)Structuralism has been weakened in favor of a kind of applied Critical Theory. Believing that Heidegger's politics vitiate his philosophy allows you to feel no guilt about no longer teaching him.

***Note that McDowell's critique of bald naturalism is a critique of the view that prevents us from treating things as both normative and causal and his appeal to Aristotlean training in virtue is a justification of our doing so as well. In addition to my take on the myth of the given, I'd like also to argue that McDowell is actually a moral externalist. This would be along the same lines of Greco's argument that McDowell is actually an epistemic externalist. But that will require much more than a blog post. For McDowell though, the problem with sense data isn't that it's both causal and normative, but rather that once we realize that objects in our environment are both causal and normative, there is no reason to posit sense data.]

When Conversation Breaks Down #572: Martin Amis Infractions tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d83451aec269e201b7c8cbdf51970b2017-01-21T06:16:40-08:002017-01-21T06:18:58-08:00By Jon Cogburn In his autobiographical Experience Martin Amis recounts a kind of occurrence that I wish we had an agreed upon name for (henceforth "Amis infraction"), an experience where someone does something to you based on false beliefs, but where their reaction would still be ethically unwarranted even if...Jon Cogburn

By Jon Cogburn

In his autobiographical Experience Martin Amis recounts a kind of occurrence that I wish we had an agreed upon name for (henceforth "Amis infraction"), an experience where someone does something to you based on false beliefs, but where their reaction would still be ethically unwarranted even if the relevant beliefs were true. In Amis' example he was walking underneath some construction scaffolding around a building and considerably slowed down because a bag-laden older woman was shuffling in front of him. All of the sudden he felt himself being picked up and placed in the road by a hurried musclebound guy behind him. The smirking cretin's girlfriend laughed at him and said something like, "You don't want to be getting in the way of my man." Amis just stared dumbfounded as the cars swerved around him and the blockhead and girlfriend walked away. The old woman had entered the building and the two jerks had no idea that he had been walking slowly because of her.

In such situations there is nothing to say. First off, we are pray animals and, with our fellow prey animals, tend to get quiet and still when suffering these kinds of infractions. This is why many of us spend so much time re-litigating what we might have said when subject to the depredations of the more predatory humans among us. Second off, the predatory humans among us don't care what the rest of us have to say. But third, and most interesting philosophically I think, in these kinds of situations correcting the relevant false empirical beliefs is actually irrelevant, because the jerk's action would not be justified even were the beliefs the jerk uses to justify the action true. Even if Amis had just been walking slowly under the scaffolding because he liked to walk slowly, the jerk would not have been justified in bodily placing him in the street. Amis desperately wanted to explain that he was going slowly because of the old lady, but at the same time realized that doing so would only add credence to the jerk's belief that his action was the kind of thing one should do to other people when they are walking slowly on their own accord.

I think that, like Amis, most of us carry these kinds of experiences around with us. For example, once when I was riding my bicycle across a street a pickup driver came very close to squashing me, theatrically speeding up to me after we'd made eye contact and then slamming on his breaks. It was pretty terrifying and caused a lot of adrenaline. And of course the guy driving the white Ford F150 (picture a late middle aged non-rednecky but sort of typically aliterate, in the way of Baton Rouge drivers of white Ford F150s) said, "Hey! You people got to follow the laws too!" It was an Amis infraction because I'd actually had the right of way. I was on the sidewalk on the left side of the street and my light showed a protected left turn. He was coming towards me on the right side of the street, which meant he had a red light. One for which he didn't stop.

The weird thing about Amis infractions is that we carry them around with us in part because we can rehears in our head a quick argument about how wrong the infractor is, an argument that we weren't able to give because the fight or flight adrenaline is pumping too hard. But this explanation doesn't quite add up. As with being bodily placed into a busy street because you are walking slowly, nothing justifies trying to teach a cyclist a lesson by nearly killing him with your truck. Even if the Baton Rouge F150 guy had had the right of way it wouldn't have justified teaching me a lesson and then nearly killing me with his truck. So, on reflection, I think that Amis infractions probably continue to haunt us in part precisely because we know that it would have been pointless to point out the mistaken beliefs that the infractor used to justify the infraction. Amis infractions are more traumatic because in this way they amplify our own powerlessness.

Part of the reason the recent presidential election has been so bad for reasonable people's mental health is because everyone who voted for Trump committed an Amis infraction. First the infraction was a a serious infraction because it is so potentially damaging to so many people (immigrants, people of color, Muslims, LGBT people, the poor, the unemployed and sick, etc. etc. etc.). Second, even if the false beliefs that Republicans used to justify voting for Trump were true, it would not have been the case that they were justified in voting for him. For example millions of people could only bring themselves to vote for Trump by believing pretty obvious falsehoods about Clinton. Even if all of those things were true, that would have justified not voting, rather than voting for Trump. So clearly the internal justification for voting for Trump wasn't really whatever set of beliefs were aligned on to justify it. And this generalizes to to other reasons, such as pro-lifers and cut-rich-people's-taxes. Even if those beliefs were true, it wouldn't justify voting for Trump. Third, due to the second criteria being fulfilled, the victims of the Trump voters are far more powerless than normal electoral losers. There's absolutely nothing one can say to the Trump infractor. Even if you could convince them that Hilary's financial greasiness is very small potatoes compared to Trump's, or that John Podesta is not a cannibal, it wouldn't make any difference. They'd still vote for him.

In one of Paul Feyerabend's books he rather terrifyingly intones, almost apropos nothing, "And of course, when conversation breaks down, then we must resort to violence." I pray that Feyerabend is wrong in making a dichotomy between conversation and violence. If he's not, and if I'm right about the ubiquity of Amis infractions in our body politic, then we are in for terrible times. I suspect that the excluded possibility here is just getting lucky as a society, which is I guess another thing to pray for.

The "Opposite Day" Argument (A Reductio of Putnam's Argument)tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d83451aec269e201bb09682a12970d2017-01-08T04:09:33-08:002017-01-08T04:09:33-08:00By Jon Cogburn One of the benefits of being a philosophy professor is that there's never any trouble with playing Opposite Day with your kids. This is the game where the world has been transformed such that English (insert your language here) is now an idiolect where every sentence means...Jon Cogburn

By Jon Cogburn

One of the benefits of being a philosophy professor is that there's never any trouble with playing Opposite Day with your kids. This is the game where the world has been transformed such that English (insert your language here) is now an idiolect where every sentence means "the opposite" of what it does in English. Most kids will play this at the lexical level, trying to come up with antonyms, e.g. "Look down at the ground!" instead of "Look up that the sky!" But this is a mug's game, at the level of your kids' art. Most words don't have "opposites." What's "the opposite" of bird? Cold-blooded invertabrate mammal who lacks feathers, wings, and beak?

But if you're a professor of analytic philosophy you've had your nose rubbed in so much Frege, Russell, and Quine that all you have to do is go sentential. Instead of saying "You mustn't look at that cold-blooded invertabrate mammal who lacks feathers, wings, and beak" all you have to say is "It is not the case that you should look at that bird." Sentential negation FTW.

Unfortunately though, if you've taken enough philosophy, then you start to notice a systematic problem with Opposite Day. At some point one of the players will invariably get flustered and say something to the effect of "O.K. It's not Opposite Day anymore." But of course, if it's Opposite Day, then the sentence that it is not the case that it is Opposite Day merely means that it is Opposite Day. Note that "It is not Opposite Day" is pragmatically analytic in the same way that "I am here" is. It is true whether it is Opposite Day or not. If it's not Opposite Day and you utter it, you are uttering something true. If it is Opposite Day, then (given what Opposite Day does to meanings) you are also uttering something true.

And of course "It is Opposite Day" is always false for the same reason. If it's not Opposite Day, the sentence is clearly false. But if it is Opposite Day, then the sentence means what we mean in non-Opposite Day English when we say "It's not the case that it's Opposite Day."

This causes a range of practical and philosophical difficulties. How does one get out of the game? Perhaps one could say "It is Opposite Day." But since "it" refers to the context of utterance, you've just uttered something false (remember, on Opposite Day, the assertion that it is Opposite Day means the same as saying that it is not the case that it is Opposite Day). Luckily though, temporal deixis gets us out of this. Consider "Thirty Seconds from now, it will be Opposite Day." This sentence works both to flip you to Opposite Day and to flip you out of Opposite Day.

Philosophically, the sentence "It is Opposite Day" functions suspiciously like "I am a Brain in a Vat." If it really were Opposite Day, then the vast majority of us are going around uttering falsehoods, and we don't even know it! Likewise (supposedly)* if the world is a Matrix and we are all just envatted brains being fed a simulacrum reality, then most of what we think we know is also false. And, if** Hilary Putnam is correct, the sentence "I am a brain in a vat" is just as pragmatically self defeating as "It is Opposite Day." If you're not a brain in a vat, you are saying something false. If you are a brain in a vat, you are also saying something false, because in the idiolect of English spoken in the vat, the words "brain" and "vat" don't refer to actual brains in vats, but rather to the fantastic images of vats and brains fed to you by your matrixy overlords. Note that Putnam's Brain in a Vat argument is, in a sense, like our children's strategies for speaking the Opposite Day idiolect. It's lexical. On the other hand, the Opposite Day argument is sentential. Moreover, it does not rely on an overstrong causal account of reference, as Putnam's does.***

So we seem to have a refutation of skepticism that doesn't rely on the causal theory of reference of individual terms! Again if radical skepticism were true, then it would be Opposite Day. So if it is not Opposite Day, then radical skepticism is false. In this manner, the skeptical argument can be rendered:

If we are brains in a vat, then “brain” does not refer to brain, and “vat” does not refer to vat (via Causal Constraint)

If “brain in a vat” does not refer to brains in a vat, then “we are brains in a vat” is false

Thus, if we are brains in a vat, then the sentence “We are brains in a vat” is false (1,2,3)

But our reformulated Putnamian Argument is the following:

Assume it is Opposite Day

If it is Opposite Day, then “It is Opposite Day” means that it is not Opposite Day

If “It is Opposite Day” means that it is not Opposite Day, then “It is Opposite Day” is false

Thus, if it is Opposite Day, then the sentence “It is Opposite Day” is false (1,2,3)

According to Hickey, in reference to Putnam's argument:

Putnam adds that “we are brains in a vat” is necessarily false, since whenever we assume it is true we can deduce its contradictory. The argument is valid and its soundness seems to depend on the truth of (3), assuming (CC) is true.

But our argument's (3) is not lexical, and so does not assume that a Causal Constraint is true! So we seem to have a much stronger anti-skeptical argument. We know it is not Opposite Day. That is, we know that it is not the case that what most human beings are asserting is false. Radical skepticism is false. Q.E.D. You're welcome, history of philosophy.****

***The moral of Putnam and Kripke's attacks on the description theory of reference isn't that we never secure reference with descriptions (where by "secure reference" I just mean that we would correctly determine that reference had failed if the description were found to be false). It's that we don't always secure reference with descriptions. Weirdly, late Putnam himself pointed this out to a generation of philosophers of language who had misread him. Read his discussion of phlogiston in Words in Life. But, as far as I know, he never realized that this admission is fatal to his anti-skeptical argument.

****Seriously, I don't know what the above shows. Maybe it shows that the focus on causal theories in Putnamian and Davidsonian anti-skeptical arguments is misplaced. On the other hand, the demonstrative "it" in "It is Opposite Day" works in many respects in the same way that causal theorists argue that reference is secured for seemingly non-indexical terms like "brain" and "vat" so there is a connection. On the assumption that there are no obvious howlers in the above, it might be be worthwhile to reread Hickey's article closely, seeing the extent to which one can mine analogues to various takes on Putnam's argument.]